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Ditch that Windows shit. I did it almost 3 years ago and have never looked back. Contrary to what Microsoft would have you beleive, you are not a moron. You *can* do everything any reasonable human being could want to do with a computer and never need Windows. (Except gaming, but I did say *reasonable human beings*)

I'm currently trying to breathe life into my cruffty old XP system. Compress files, defrag, uninstalling...Ubuntu thy day is nigh.

I still haven't actually seen a live system running Vista. I've gotten out of gaming in the last few years and haven't really paid any attention to Windows since. I still have a XP install on the harddrive of my laptop but haven't needed to boot into it in a year or so. And since Vista won't run on my laptop, it would be cheaper for me to buy an X-Box to run games on then buy a system that can run Vista.

I have Vista and XP on my MacBook Pro via vmWare "just in case" I need something. I rarely need something I can't do in Mac OS X. The only thing I've used recently was to play with Netflix's online viewing (you have to upgrade to WMP10. Then install a bunch of DRM things. Then REBOOT. Then go back to Netflix and find the film you want again. Then watch it). The other thing I used if for was to play Solitare since I was on a plane and didn't have a Mac version installed. The Vista version of Solitare is prettier than the XP version which hasn't changed since Win3.0.

I must use a PC at work and hate it. When I work from home, I'll cheat and use the Mac as much as I can but there's Microsoft SharePoint things and MS SQL server things that does not get along with the Mac.

Y'know, people have said that about Windows and gaming for years, and it seems to me that it's less true than ever. Flash games, casual games and emulation are all more popular than ever. And, on the other end, consoles are closer to PC specs than ever before (and, maybe more importantly, console online services may have reached critical mass).

I might be wrong about all this, or my own biases might be showing, but it seems to me that we just might be a couple console MMORPGs away from putting the you-need-Windows-for-gaming thing to bed. (Well, unless you like flight sims.)

Unfortunately, I can't afford a Mac (if I could, I would have bought a Macbook instead of this Samsung laptop I'm using now) and Linux really isn't an option for me, as some of the stuff I use is Windows/Mac only. So I'm stuck using Windows (but I don't really mind). I was thinking about "upgrading" to XP, but now that I bought an extra gig of memory, Vista has stopped lagging and become usable. I like it slightly better than XP, so it's staying.